Conversations with Todd McFarlane
Over thirty years after his initial ascent to super stardom, Todd McFarlane (b. 1961) remains one of the most popular and contentious comic artists ever. The interviews compiled in this volume offer a nuanced portrait of McFarlane’s polarizing character. Beginning with his earliest days on Spider-Man to the months before the hotly anticipated release of Spawn and ending with his writing ventures decades later, the interviews offer compelling perspectives from the renowned creator.
As the most vocal representative of Image Comics, McFarlane, alongside Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino, Marc Silvestri, and Whilce Portacio, was a veritable rock star. Eager fans swarmed into lengthy lines around comic book stores and conventions, waiting for their chance at a thirty-second autograph. The book offers a glimpse into the comic book world of the early 1990s, a world rampant with variant covers, impossibly exaggerated bodies, and wild speculation about what would be the next comic to explode in value. The volume also includes the momentous public debate between McFarlane and Peter David, former collaborator on The Incredible Hulk, moderated by the late George Pérez at a standing-room-only event at ComicsFest in 1993. While this world sounds almost inconceivable to the comic book fan of today, it was the milieu in which McFarlane rose to stardom and excelled like no other, leaving his mark on the medium forever.
Jake Zawlacki is a writer, translator, and scholar. His critical interests include popular American comics of the early 1990s, as well as Kazakh animation and film, with essays appearing in ImageTexT, Inks, the Comics Journal, and Folklorica. His translations of Akhmet Baitursynuly’s poetry have appeared in Guernica and Asymptote. He holds degrees from Louisiana State University, University of San Diego, and Stanford University, and his creative work has been published in the Saturday Evening Post, The Journal, Two Hawks Quarterly, and the Citron Review.
